My Focused PLN is the Google Educators site. This was an easy decision for me as all of our schools use chromebooks and most students are already familiar with this interface. As a teacher-librarian, I think becoming an expert at how to use this site will benefit not only myself as an educator, but will allow me to offer professional development for my colleagues that are not yet versed in Google Classroom. As we make connections with teachers, they will trust in our ability to offer suggestions and insight to new technologies that can make their teaching and lessons more efficient and effective. The Google Educators site is easy to navigate, offers a variety of helpful sights including training, certification, resources, and communities you can follow. I find this extremely valuable as Google is a platform that is here to stay, is used by almost all school districts and teachers, and is a website that can be accessed from anywhere at anytime. I would highly encourage all TL’s to make this their professional development over the summer. Learn how to use the Google Suite of products and know how to integrate this into the BC curriculum. In a time where teacher librarians are constantly getting their hours cut, we need to show our colleagues that we are at the forefront of learning and able to provide and explain about the tools necessary to teach in a 2.0 environment.
It's a great idea to choose a PLN that directly connects with the platform you have available at your school. I appreciate the sentiment of developing professionally over the summer as a Teacher Librarian. This was a topic we discussed in TL Part 1. It is certainly important to continue developing our familiarity with technology if we are going to become "tech leaders".